AUTHENTIC ANTHROPOLOGICAL AUTHORITARIANISMS

Modeling the Moment

by Hugh M. Lewis

The man from Crete said, "All Cretans are liars."

This prospectus is concerned with the connection of two kinds of anthropological authoritarianism: the 'objective' external form of socio-cultural psychological authoritarianism which, though variably expressed in the world, nevertheless evinces certain prototypical features, at least hypothetically, which are cross-culturally robust and therefore generally pan-human; and the more 'subjective' internal kind of 'academic authoritarianism' which is claimed to characterize the professional anthropological ego to an uncertain varying degree, especially as this is expressed in everyday activities within the department setting and as it becomes authoritatively and 'authorially' articulated in wider professional academic forums. These two kinds of anthropological authoritarianism are not clearly separable, and are in fact but two sides of the same coin of 'culture and character'. This hooks up both horns of a basic anthropological dilemma--the claim to anthropological authenticity must always be a relative, non-absolute claim to anthropological authority, and yet authenticity tends to relativize authority, while authority tends to jeopardize authenticity.

The social construction of human reality, its three critical moment of externalization, objective reification and legitimation, and its subjectivation, is closely paralleled by the 'anthropological construction of academic reality with its corresponding critical moments of externalization of Otherness, reification of Difference and Identity, and the professional internalization of Ego Authority. Both bring with them the problem of authority and authoritarianism in mutual reinforcement in a process Anthony Giddens (1979) has referred to as 'structuration'--'Conditions governing the continuity or transformation of structures, and therefore the reproduction of systems' and 'To study the structuration of a social system is to study the ways in which that system, via the application of generatie rules and resources, and in the context of unintended outcome, is produced and reproduced in interaction.' (page 66)--and in the activation of collective archetypes that Ruth Benedict has referred to as 'cultural configurations'--'Every culture…permits only a limited number of types to flourish and they are those that fit its dominant theme.' (Melford Singer, 1961) This problem of the systemic intersection and systemic reproduction of complementary happenstance is what Marshall Sahlins refers to as the 'structure of the conjuncture'.

The general problem of authoritarianism is neither sociological nor psychological, but its nexus is somewhere in between in the interrelationship between personality and society--and this in betweeness of authoritarianism begs the whole question of human relativity of knowledge and values, as a problematic which is inherently paradoxical and Janus faced. Anthropological relativism constitutes a critique of ethnocentrism and yet its unreflexive recognition and promotion in the world leas to anthropological ethnocentrism. "Certainly linguistic awareness, linguistic pride, a belief in linguistic specialness and in the inherent untranslatability of one's own vernacular or some other superposed language have been frequent components of the ethnocentrism and the world views of many peoples, past and present." (Fishman; 1960: 324)

Making the critical 'moment' of authentic anthropological authoritarianisms depends upon a rather quasi formal kind of 'paradigm' which has many facets, and yet the horizon of which may be approximately delimited thusly:

As a social construction of reality, the 'anthropological world view' in the widest sense can be referred to as 'conceptual machineries' of ideological/institutional legitimation of the predominant social order in which its knowledge is mostly situated. Anthropologists become full time knowledge experts increasingly removed from the pragmatic necessities of everyday life. They deal with 'pure theory' abstractly removed from the vicissitudes and relations with the everyday world in a sort of platonic heaven of a-historical and a-social ideation. This is, of course, an illusion but it can have great socio historical potency, by virtue of the relationship between the reality defining and reality producing processes. (Berger and Luckmann; 1966: 116) As 'universal experts' anthropologists claim 'expertise in ultimate definitions of reality as such'. "They are not only experts in this or that sector of the societal stock of knowledge, they claim ultimate jurisdiction over that stock of knowledge in its totality…they claim to know the ultimate significance of what everybody knows and does…" (Berger and Luckmann; 1966: 117)

One of the principal functions of such machinery is 'nihilation' use to 'liquidate conceptually everything outside the same universe…nihilation denies the reality of whatever phenomena or interpretations of phenomena do not fit into that universe.' (page 114) As such conceptual machinery, its nihilating function 'involves the more ambitious attempt to account for all deviant definitions of reality in terms of concepts belonging to one's own universe…the deviant conceptions are not merely assigned a negative status, they are grappled with theoretically in detail. The final goal of this procedure is to incorporate the deviant conceptions within one's own universe, and thereby to liquidate them ultimately. The deviant conceptions must, therefore, be translated into concepts derived from one's own universe. In this manner, the negation of one's universe is subtly changed into an affirmation of it. The presupposition is always that the negator does not really know what he is saying. His statements become meaningful only as they are translated into more 'correct terms', that is terms deriving from the universe he negates…'(page 115)

Such anthropological authoritarianism is a kind of rational (and rationalizing) authoritarianism which construes as its object a set of rationally ordered interests which are 'larger than life'--whether it is pursuit of development for the sake of development ('it will happen anyway') or the pursuit of scientific progress, or the service of the system, or of anthropology as an ideological enterprise. Such rational authoritarianism must make sense of nonsense, placing into logical order that which lacks a semblance of order.

In this regard, the particular qualities of American Character and Cultural configuration are also pertinent, in what Francis L. Hsu has called the 'cult of rugged individualism' which accounts for both the creative side of the American Dream and the ugly side of American violence. 'Deviations of which we and our society approve we term creativity, but creativity of which we disapprove we term deviation. The more rugged the individualist, the more likely the individualist is to be creative in the drive towards goals, with or without regard for the established rules, and the individualist is less inclined to concern himself/herself with whether successes are to be achieved at the expense of others…even to separate ambitions from the 'human feelings within himself'. To succeed the rugged individualist is 'driven' to treat all other human beings as things, to be manipulated, forced or eliminated if they happen to get in the way of his forward march.' (1983: x) In a similar vein, Ruth Benedict offered a striking indictment of the grandiose egotism promoted by western civilization in general:

We are left with a culture historical mythological and ideological complex of the 'Superman'--whether this is the Superman of Hollywood legends, Babe Ruth, Ayn Rand's red-haired Irish American Howard Roark in her novel "The Fountainhead' or Nietsche's conception of Ubermensch. The ideal Superman is at once a low key team player and simultaneously, in secret, a Savior endowed with superhuman powers. As Jacque Marret wrote somewhat prophetically in 1923: "Primitive philosophy is hardly capable of the paradox of admiring a good later…"

Our mining of the anthropological imagination reveals the basically non-rational illusion and irrational source of our 'rational authoritarianism' in its quest for the supernormal, in its march for developmental progress for its own sake, in its service to a totally depersonalized System which is itself its own super organic reification. Like modern totalitarianism to which it is not unrelated, modern authoritarianism is "an experimental, sadistic, yet frivolous fury that makes no sense…It is not a miscalculation of means to ends. At the core it is not rational at all. Orwell saw it as an awful obsession of power. Arendt saw it as a radical evil that defies reason." (John S. Nelson; 1989: 263) It is some which faithful Marxists have known all along: "Capital based production…creates a system for the universal exploitation of natural and human qualities; even science, like all physical and spiritual human traits, is a mere vehicle of this system of universal utility; there is nothing beyond this sphere of social production and exchange which would act as an entity superior in itself, justified in and of itself." (Karl Marx; 1939: 313)

It is apparent that we must look for a non-rational (hence emotional, conative) basis for our 'rational authoritarianism' as something which is culturally sanctioned projection onto our world of deeply seated unconscious conflicts and of past separation episodes which we reconstruct and reenact in our current situations in a self fulfilling manner. Culture is this regard may either assist us in assuaging and given expression for our personal grief and suffering or else it may help us to deny and to prevent and frustrate such expression. We are then confronted by the mise en abyme of the relativity of both cultures and character, that one individual's deviance or psychosis may be effectively translated into a collective pattern of cultural elaboration or 'archosis' and therefore there are no 'baseline' of rational sanity or reason by which we can judge all people and every cultural configuration. From this perspective, our rational authoritarianisms as ideological rationalizations, as defense mechanisms of insecure ego identity displaced upon the outside world become something of a self fulfilling prophecy: "Definitions of reality have self fulfilling potency." (Berger and Luckmann; 1966: 128)

Erich Fromm writes of the reification of human identity as the central problem of our modern world. "Man is not a thing, and if you try to transform him into a thing, you damage him.":

Fromm distinguishes between 'authoritarian conscience', the 'superego' of the internalized law of the father, and then, of society, and the 'humanistic conscience' which is not internalized authority at all but an inner 'voice that calls us back to ourselves'--'the human core common to all men, that is, certain basic characteristics which cannot be violated or negated without serious consequences.' This humanistic conscience, he asserts, is rooted in the great traditions of religious philosophy.

From such a constructionist framework of 'anthropological world view' the authoritarian validation of the anthropological ego can be seen in terms of the classic Freudian, Oedipus complex of the socialization, internalization and identification with 'The Law of the Father' by its successful incorporation and embodiment in the beingness of the anthropological ego, in structural negation and implicit denial of what might be called the Feminist construction of the inherently detotalizing 'Body of the Mother'. In the dialectics of anthropological discourse, the totalizing and authoritarian Law of the Father, represents the predominant collectivizing thesis of anthropology as 'cross cultural science' while the contrapuntally detotalizing representations of 'The Body of the Mother' (Otherness as seen as death and difference) represents the relativizing antithesis of anthropology as part of the particularistic, 'Geisteswissenschaften' of the Humanities.

To insist upon the claim that the psycho-social dynamics and authorial dialectics, of anthropological authoritarianism is not an intrinsic, inextricably part of the academic articulation and reproduction of anthropology is to spuriously dichotomize personal and professional domains of experience and to imply that the factors and forces which necessarily come to bear in one world are independent of those influences of the other world. This tacitly supports the tacit 'Science as disinterested inquiry' stance of anthropological praxis which is held to covertly support and legitimate the authoritarian status quo in the world. On the other hand, to give too much weight to the rule and influence of authoritarianism in the culture historical reticulation and scientific advance of anthropological awareness is to disproportionately credit it with more than its due. If anything is apparent about the world, it is that anthropological understanding has achieved its progress not because of, but in reaction to and inspite of the usually mitigating and destructive interference of anthropological authoritarianism. 'Authentic anthropology' as always arisen from the relativistic ashes of the destruction of the culture historical gardens and world empires of spurious anthropological authority. "Spurious culture is extraneous to the individual, cultivating an attitude of non-participation and alienation. While the genuine culture serves to nurture the creative potential of human beings, the spurious culture is inherently frustrating, fragmentary and wasting of human endeavor and sentiment." (Bruce Grindal; 1979: 13)

A general theory of anthropological relativism sees rational and other forms of authoritarianism as a function of human exploitation in the world, especially as this is defined in Marxist terms of the appropriation of surplus labor value, and therefore, is also correlated strongly with the principle of 'alienation' in both the Marxist sense as the loss of control over one's own labor value, and in terms of depersonalization, anomie, powerlessness and isolation or separation within society. It is thus correlated with the complementary notion of reification and with the subject/object dichotomization of human consciousness. The chain is a dialectical one, and hence is a relativistic model of world view rather than a deterministic one. In this model, the chain of association is extended to include psycho social factors of 'status role identification', structural-functional positionality, aggression and its expression, and sets of expectations and their relative/absolute deprivation, frustration and asymmetrical fulfillment.

This model of anthropological authoritarianism encompasses not just 'rational authoritarianism' but a relatively complete spectrum of possible kinds of authoritarianism which range upon a continuum of interpersonal/psychic intensity and socio-structural complexity and scale. Thus we may have a continuum of identified authoritarianisms:

Given such a model, it is important to understanding the interconnections between the incidence and style patterns of authoritarian power structures/personalities, political economy, the expression of aggression and violence and of socio-religio-ideological complexes of belief and behavior. The connection between trade and warfare is well established, (Marshall Sahlins; Primitive Economies), and the establishment of an administrative/financial/bureaucratic/policing complex in order to regulate, facilitate and promote and protect economic/political interests is also firmly established. Less well studied is the role which religious organization may play in this kind of authoritarian complex--the merchant/missionaries, Muslim traders, Brahmin priest/politicians, Buddhist emissaries/economists. All the world's great religions have this angle in the promotion of political economic empires in the name of God and civilization. In this regard the contributions of Max Weber in identifying the notion of the Calling in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in identifying the 'rational' role of Bureaucracy. Eric Chefyitz (1990) links the rise of legalism, personal property, the conception of the 'self' and the rise of American Capitalism.

Such a model of anthropological authoritarianism begs the question of whether we must look for a pan human heart of darkness in all of us as possible, potential authoritarians, given the proper conditions/circumstances for its development and expression, and that few of us have achieved a 'post conventional' stage of moral development which would preclude the possibility of such expression. Authoritarianism is not only a basic component of human character and personality in each and all of us, but even more importantly, it is necessarily a 'psycho-geographical' extension of one's personality and identification into one's surrounding environment with both intentional causes and unintended consequences--it is an unavoidable function of our displacement of self onto the environment, the 'embodiment' of the world in our experiences of it, and the environmental expression of our experiences and of our personalization. To the extent that we find 'ideas of reference', alienation, threat of aggression, violence, and hostility, fear, feelings of persecution and guilt, rooted in the background environments of our everyday experiences, we must expect some form of authoritarian response which can be seen as an expression of basic human aggression and a survival instinct.

We must also ask whether humankind might not best be characterized as Homo Auctoritas and extension of Louis Dumont's socio-centric conception of Hindu Indians as Homo Hierarchicus, to encompass the whole arc of human possibility. If this characterization is fitting, then we must ask what the role of Homo Democritus has been in the world, except as an ongoing culture historical dialectic of Conformity versus Freedom, as something of a counter cultural revitalization or social movement realizable only in small, face to face, gemeinschaaft and always tending toward the structure of the 'The Believer'.

Finally, the only appropriate authority which I claim is 'autobiographical authority'. To attempt ethnographic 'membership role' observing participation within an anthropology department is to bring the strange too close to home for comfort, and to make the familiar too strange, not only ethically and normatively but cognitively as well. One becomes of necessity an 'outsider' looking upon one's own world. Anthropological authoritarianism does not like to have done to itself what it does routinely to 'others' as a matter of course. It does not like to see itself as it likes to see others--as something small and petty like any native village, tribalistic in its mentality and ethos, sometimes eating its own human heart of darkness. Anthropological authoritarianism is, upon an everyday basis of 'anthropological astonishment' an 'unconscious' phenomena usually kept safely in the background in the anthropological enactment and everyday presentation of the anthropological ego. It is as such an 'out of awareness' pre-understanding of one's significant realities which can nevertheless evince itself in quite deliberate, sophisticated, systematic and coordinate ways within the departmental setting.

One does not throw stones in glass houses. Having learned my lessons in anthropological authority the hard way, I would extend my claim about the ultimately relativistic 'autobiographical authority' to encompass all forms of authorial discourse seeking 'anthropological authenticity' in the human world. My own accounting of the social events of my experience may not be any more or less accurate, valid, reliable or genuine than anyone else's recounting of the same events. I can only witness these events in as 'self evident' a manner as seems apparent to myself, however off-colored by my own secret interests and intentional forgetting of the past. The human world remains an open hearing, a daily trial, until our final judgment day.